Polish authorities believe they have located lost Nazi train after a deathbed confession led treasure hunters to its secret location.

A deathbed confession may have revealed the location of a Nazi train rumoured to have been carrying gold, which has been missing in Poland since the second world war.

Fortune hunters flock to Polish town after alleged find of Nazi gold train

Read more

Poland’s deputy culture minister, Piotr Żuchowski, said ground-penetrating radar had found images of a buried train near Wałbrzych, in the country’s south-west, on a 4km stretch of railway near the Wrocław-Wałbrzych line.

Calling it an exceptional find, Żuchowski said the fact that the train appeared to be armoured indicated that it might be carrying valuable cargo. A deathbed confession from an unnamed man had led officials to the site, he added. Żuchowski said the dying man was involved in the operation to hide the train 70 years ago. “I am more than 99% certain that this train exists,” he told a press conference on Friday.

The German train, which may contain up to 300 tonnes of gold, jewels and weapons, as well as valuable art, has long been rumoured to have gone missing when the Nazis were fleeing Russia’s Red Army.

According to local legend, an armoured train packed with treasure from the then German city of Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) was driven into a tunnel in a hillside near a medieval castle near Wałbrzych as the Red Army was approaching and the Allies were carrying out airstrikes in the final days of the war.

During the war, the Germans built a system of underground tunnels in the mountainous region of Wałbrzych and the city of Wrocław, from where the train is believed to have departed. The area was German territory at the time, but became part of Poland when the war ended. Treasure hunters have been searching for the train since the end of the war, as did the Polish army during the communist era, but it was never found.

Earlier this month, a Pole and a German, acting through lawyers, told local authorities they had found an armoured train with valuables in a disused tunnel and demanded a finder’s fee of 10%.

Żuchowski told reporters on Friday the lawyers had been informed the train was over 100 metres long. He said he was shown a blurred image from a ground-penetrating radar that showed the shape of a train platform and cannons. “We will be 100% sure only when we find the train,” he said. Wałbrzych regional authorities would conduct the search, using military explosives experts, in a procedure that would take weeks, he added.

“This is a find of world significance, on a par with discovering the Titanic,” Jarosław Chmielewski, the lawyer who has written to the parish council on the men’s behalf, told Radio Wrocław last month.

Previously, talk of Nazi treasure in Wałbrzych led to speculation that the long-lost Czarist Amber Room, of which treasure hunters have reported sightings in plenty of other locations, was to be found in the region, specifically in a tunnel leading to Wałbrzych castle. Despite searches, nothing has ever been found.